Backup and restore your instances

Prerequisites

• You have created a Redis instance.
  Check Create and manage instances for Redis

Introduction

Backup and restore is an essential feature to guarantee the SLAs of your service. STACKIT’s Redis offers backup and restore capabilities to help you achieving this goal. These are the features of the backup and restore capabilities:

• Backup and in-place-restore of your instances
• Automated scheduled backups every 4 hours
• Create manual backups
• Download your backups
• backup retention for 14 days
• All settings are accessible by the portal, the CLI, Cloud Foundry and Terraform

Backup

STACKIT’s Redis automatically creates a backup every 4 hours. This backups are held for 14 days. If you want a longer backup history, you need to download the created backups.

You need to create an encryption key before you are able to download your backups. Creating an encryption key only affects future backups.

You don’t pay for the backup itself, but for the storage the generated backup files reserve. The storage size depends on your backup settings and of the accumulated instance databases size. At the moment you need to estimate the storage need by yourself.

Backup settings and their description

Setting	Description	Options
Encryption Key	Defines the key with which the STACKIT system encrypts the backup	custom string

List existing backups

You can get an overview of all existing backups.

STACKIT Portal

You can view all backups by navigating to the Backups tab at the service dashboard of your instance.

1. Open your project in the STACKIT Portal

2. Navigate to Databases > Redis

3. Select your Redis instance and go to Overview

4. On the pane on the left select Backups

5. You see a list of all backups with their properties:

   ID, Start time, End time, Backup size, Backup status, Restore created at

   If you created an encryption key prior to the start time of a backup, you are able to download it via the thre dots menu on the right of the entry.

Create an encryption key

You can create an encryption key to be able to download your backups.

STACKIT Portal

To create an encryption key follow the steps below. You need to store the key in a safe place.

1. Open your project in the STACKIT Portal
2. Navigate to Databases > Redis
3. Select your Redis instance and go to Overview
4. On the pane on the left click on Backups
5. On the top bar click on Create encryption key
6. Enter an encryption key with a minimum length of 8 characters and click on Create

The backups are encrypted at creation time. If you change your encryption key, you need to preserve the prior key to be able to encrypt backups created with it.

Trigger a manual backup

You can trigger a manual backup everytime.

STACKIT Portal

You can trigger a manual backup in the backup overview pane.

1. Open your project in the STACKIT Portal
2. Navigate to Databases > Redis
3. Select your Redis instance and go to Backups
4. Click on Create manual backup
5. In the popup click on create
6. Wait until the status of the backup becomes Done

Download a backup

You can trigger a manual backup everytime.

STACKIT Portal

You can download a backup in the backup overview pane.

1. Open your project in the STACKIT Portal
2. Navigate to Databases > Redis
3. Select your Redis instance and go to Backups
4. Choose a backup to download and click on the three-dots-menu
5. Click on Download If there is no Download option, then the backup was created without encryption. Always Create an encryption key before inserting important data into your instance.
6. Wait until the download finishes

You can only download backups which were encrypted at creation time. To encrypt backups, Create an encryption key.

Restore

You can restore a specific backup to the same instance. To restore your backup to a new instance, you need to download the backup and restore it manually after creating a new instance.

Managed restore to the same instance

STACKIT Portal

You can do a restore by navigating to the Backups tab at the service dashboard of your instance and unsing the restore button.

1. Open your project in the STACKIT Portal
2. Navigate to Databases > Redis
3. Select your Redis instance and go to Backups
4. Click on the three dots menu of the right side of your desired backup you plan to restore
5. Click on Restore
6. On the popup, read the warning that all data in your instance gets overwritten
7. If this is ok, click on Restore

Decrypting of a downloaded backup file

You can download and decrypt your backup files. This is useful, if you plan to store your data independently of STACKIT.

STACKIT Portal

1. Download the encrypted backup
   1. Open your project in the STACKIT Portal
   2. Navigate to Databases > Redis
   3. Select your Redis instance and go to Backups
   4. Click on the three dots menu of the right side of your desired backup you plan to restore and click on Download
   5. Wait for the download to finish
2. Decrypt the downloaded backup

   1. Open a shell and navigate to the folder where you downloaded the backup into

   2. Decrypt and unzip the backup: <encrypted-backup-file> is the placeholder for the downloaded file. <target-backup-file-prefix> is the name of the target file without the file ending. You can freely choose this name according to the limitations of your local file system.

      cat <encrypted-backup-file> | openssl enc -aes256 -md md5 -d -pass 'pass:<encryption-key>' > <target-backup-file-prefix>.rdb.tar.gz
      tar -xvjf <target-backup-file-prefix>.sql.gz

   3. Verify the file: Use the file command to verify the decrypted and uncompressed backup:

      file dump.rdb

      If everything is correct, file will return something like this:

      dump.rdb: Redis RDB file, version 0011